Via Durova I find Wikitruth Through Wikiorder which is worth at least a quick skim if only because, unlike most commentators on wiki, they don’t seem to have totally lost the plot.

Durova points out the obvious lack in their analysis: they concentrate on arbcomm, whereas the everyday activity of admins stomping on fools escapes their notice. For example, I’ve done 500 admin-type things in the past year, most of them blocking people for edit warring in one way or another. That is puny compared to the general block log, which has 500 blocks in the last 10 hours, mostly just for tedious vandalism. Wiki would collapse in a heap fairly quickly if this kind of background enforcement didn’t go on. But since it is fun, people don’t mind doing it.

Since it’s an article in a law-review journal, it makes sense to me that they concentrate on ArbCom. When dealing with the “real” law they tend to have a similar focus, spending lots of time on the handful of cases the US Supreme Court decides every year, and relatively little time on routine police activity. In particular, I think they’re more interested in what lessons Wikipedia can give about the formation of legal-ish arbitration processes, than they are specifically about how Wikipedia works in its non-legal aspects.